Rats and Drugs and Drugs and Rats!

My nails are painted a bright pink.  I can't stand wearing the white lab coat under the sterile lights. So I wear brightly colored socks and paint my nails.   Once another lab tech and I sedated one of our favorites animal buddies - m-3284rs. A largish white male that we thought identified as a female. We painted her nails pink and fancied things up with a bow.  Dr. Bob at the research facility didn't think it was funny.  In high school I identified as goth.  Dressed in black, the whole shaboodle-doodle.  Now I look like a goth barbie.  I’m stressing.  I’ve got to finish this practicum, defend my paper, get my ticket and start paying off student debt loans.  I am starting to feel more like the rats, trapped or running nowhere.  The only thing I am excited about is my research.  To say I was a disturbed kid is no overstatement.  My mom said it a lot, so did my teenaged friends, when I pricked my finger in science and squeezed out enough blood to turn my tongue bright red. I was definitely a science and math kid, and my good grades put me in the company of the smart kids, who were usually a pretty boring hang, but at least knew who Baudelaire and Rimbaud were and listened to Patti Smith and The Misfits, I was always wearing a too large Misfits shirt which made me look even more waif-like than I was.  I was also into theatre and orchestra and they loved me there too, so I was friends with some of those nerds.  Mostly I found the fringe people and did the fringe things.  I had acid for the first time my junior year.  Some tie-die festival.  Why rats?  Why rats?  After explaining my thesis a hundred times to people who just nodded blankly, I had reduced my answer to "I want to know if rats have fun and suffer like people".  I remember shouting that at closing time in a crowded college bar to a drunk english major who went home with me.   You know how certain things adults tell you when you are a kid stick in your head, ominously.  Like something you see on video that you can't forget, or a story you read that makes you see something you never saw.  I was punch drunk and laughing when I watched a BBC nature channel  show about monkeys, the monkeys were stealing drinks at the beach, and acting like drunk little humans. The narrator claims that, just like humans, 5 percent of monkeys will keep drinking until they pass out.  And, did you know rats can move to rhythm like people, too.  They played some rats rock music like Queen,  and classical Mozart and they really dug 120 beats per minutes, just like humans.  The sober rats craved silence and were probably as confused by the Grateful Dead as I was. These little bits of the puzzle made me curious, and I learned that rats on cocaine like Jazz over Beethoven.  I fucking hate jazz, especially B-bop!  But I will do coke when someone else has it.  The more I researched, the more studies I found involving giving rats drugs.  Caffeine and amphetamines makes them run around like crazy and get nothing done.  Alcohol affects the hippocampus and rats have trouble doing sudoku puzzles when they are blacked out, who knew?  On and on, marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, heroin, sugar, now sugar really messes things up, but that sweet and evil nicotiana is the beast, eye clawing withdrawal and sweats.  GABA, dopamine, "Reward System Disruption"  Haha, no kidding.  GABA, GABA hey GABA.  I fumbled through undergrad, I used to tell people that I was majoring in medicine, then after they indicated approval, I would wait a couple seconds then deadpan "yeah, self medicine; LSD, Adderall, Marijuana and Multi vitamins." Hahaha!  I majored in psychology, but didn't want to listen to people complain about their lives, and research seemed interesting. I started to get interested in psychopharmacology after a university sponsored exchange trip to Germany.  I was traded to Heidelberg University in Mannheim, and made friends with some weirdos in the psychopharmacology program.  Around this time, I started listening to metal music, not the sugar sweet stuff, but the dark, low and guttural drop tuned growl stuff.  I had a reset moment at the huge Wacken metal festival, an epiphany of sorts.  That people and rats are the same, we're all one, the same, yada hey...  But rats and humans seem to have a special kinship, more than monkeys even.  At the metal festival, watching leather clad, metal heads, slurp beer and get excited and scream and laugh and yell and pass out.  From a hill, they bounced and bobbed en masse, some were more gregarious than others, some more aggressive, some preferred alcohol, some preferred other things, I was introduced to whippits - nitrous oxide brain rockets.  Don't get me started about the toilets.  I joked about the cathartic anger of overflowing toilets and trash cans. I met Jan at this festival, hereafter named "Dutchie".  Dutchie and I became close and we shared some of my first discussions about rats vs. people, similarities and differences.  We proposed a new thrash band - Drugged Rats or Rat Dung or Rave Rats.  I can't remember all the rat themed album and song suggestions.  We even got matching rat tattoos, a rat with dangerous eyes holding a dagger and a bottle and a as an inside joke, "FHRR on its chest) - Fuck Humans Rats Rule.  There was this Rat Park study, rats that lived in a little amusement park were less likely to do drugs.  Ha ha, no shit. Seriously, though, I hate my mother, well, hate is a strong word.  She annoys me to no end.  She still says things like you'd look better if you got your hair out of your face and how are you going to get married if you work all the time.   My favorite is when she hugs me and moves her finger in front of my face and says tick-tock, tick-tock, I want grandkids before I die.  I don't tell her that I see people all the time and that I don't have any trouble getting laid, but I don't want to share my life with anyone and I'm damn right never having babies.  Her and Dad had a borderline codependent relationship and it is why I am so fucked up I guess, but I'm not into blaming myself and what they did is because of who they are, I am different.  Dutchie called me the other day, from Amsterdam.  I was excited to share all the news of my research but what I was learning was so groundbreaking that I didn't want to divulge it even to Dutchie.  It was quite literally a paradigm shift dude!  Dutchie has a nice research job with a large petroleum company, trying to find ways to make products less harmful to humans, so they start by killing rats. I loved Dutchie to death, but trust in the scientific community is placebo and this news was too big.  Dr. Bob was starting to pressure me for more and more hours.  I had papers due and I was an assistant at one class.  I was starting to get a little crazy with my research, which had to be done when no one was in the lab.  Some nights I was only getting a few hours of sleep. Pacing my cage.  Nose against the glass.  The drugs helped, they were giving me doses of an experimental mRNA dopamine reuptake inhibitor, that my friend developed in the chem lab. mRNA's make proteins and can grow dopamine receptors through biosynthesis and that means more ways to receive that glorious mother load of pleasure. It also stimulated energy, so I was a slow and mushy-smiled as a heroin low, with the sky touching bounce of the most powerful methamphetamine. I was invincible.  You were like a deity to me.  Giving out doses like holy communion.  I was crazy, and in love with you, your painted nails, your eye sockets like dark caves.  I don't know when you started giving me the psychedelics, it was like a tunnel of swirl and mix, reflections of pixelated color puddles against the sterile hum of the laboratory.  You and I became one thing, a series of checked boxes and vital statistic monitoring.  "Subject seems to be in an expanding state of delusional actions".  Now I'm scratching fleas and tearing at my dry raw skin, flaking, raking, clawing.  You are gone, gone. My tail is bruised and all I want is sugar water and drugs.